Albrechts Blog


Archive for December, 2009

Ubuntu Karmic on FSC Lifebook P1610

Friday, December 11th, 2009

For a year or so I run Ubuntu (Hardy) on a Fujitsu Siemens P1610 convertible. Last week I updated it to Karmic and had do redo (at least partially) the special setup steps needed on this hardware.

As the P1610 has a Touchcsreen which can be converted into Tablet PC mode, obviously this part is the most crucial setup task.

Last year I found enough information on the net to complete this setup (and finally got all hardware working, including the fingerprint scanner, with Karmic simply install the fprint packages).

The touchscreen in my setup is controlled by a perl script (I think I got it from http://www.coderaptors.com/?Kubuntu_on_a_Lifebook_P1610 or http://samengstrom.com/nxl/3566/p1510_touchscreen_page.en.html) which is fired by the fsc_btn driver (http://sourceforge.net/projects/fjbtndrv/develop)

The perl script needs a special module:http://search.cpan.org/~ctrondlp/X11-GUITest-0.21/GUITest.pm and fscrotd (part of fjbtndrv) two rotation scripts. These scripts call the perl script with apropriate parameters to adjust the pen to the rotated geometry.

This time I have put all together in Ubuntu Karmic packages (you can get them at http://www.algepop.net/users/alge/p1610 or as part of our local ubuntu archive at http://ubuntu.uni-klu.ac.at/). The fjbtndrv uses DKMS, so it should compile the kernel module itself. The fsc-p1610 package contains the special scripts und depends on the needed fjbtndrv and perl package.

BTW, I use the fjbtndrv package also on my new Fujitsu T5010 (also a convertible).

Dropbear for Verbatim SOHONAS (ex SmartDisk)

Friday, December 11th, 2009

After using two of those SmartDisk SOHONAS drives for a year, I decided to add some useful stuff to its firmware.

Following the instructions e.g. on http://paul.chavent.free.fr/linux-nas.html it is easy to compile small packages, e.g. dropbear for use as small ssh server.

The result can be found at http://www.algepop.net/users/alge/sohonas/, the tar file contains ssh, sshd and scp binaries (it puts it on the disk partition at /usr/hddapps where also samba and ftpd reside). Use it at your own risk, of course you need to enable telnet support before to be able to extract it on the device (if the standard busybox tar fails, use the additionally provided gnutar).